IAmNotaHipster Shows Even Cool Kids Have Soul

I Am Not a Hipster goes beneath the surface of the cool kids. Photo: Brett Pawlak

PARK CITY, Utah — It might be easy to write off Destin Daniel Cretton’s film I Am Not a Hipster as exactly the kind of too-cool-for-school creation that its title tries to distance the movie from.

[bug id=”sundance”] But in actuality, the honorific is designed to do the opposite — to raise curiosity just enough that you want to see the film. When you do, you won’t be disappointed.

I Am Not a Hipster‘s hero Brook (played by Dominic Bogart) is a talented singer-songwriter who is tremendously well-liked and admired for his work in San Diego’s indie music scene — despite the fact he’s something of a douche. He’s still dealing with the death of his mother and a breakup with his girlfriend, and has largely decided that making art is a waste of time. His fixed-gear-bike-racing friend Clarke (Alvaro Orlando) does his best to cheer him up and encourage him to make music, to no avail.

Kinda sound like hipsters, don’t they? That’s the point. The title is meant to remove the negative connotation from the word “hipster” by showing people who fit the hipster mold having real problems.

“[The title] was a specific line in the movie that we ended up cutting and the title just stayed,” writer/director Cretton said in an interview with Wired.com at the Sundance Film Festival, where I Am Not a Hipster premiered Friday as part of the festival’s Next program for innovative filmmaking.

“People usually assume that a hipster is really pretentious about art and clothes and creativity, but that’s not the people that I know in the indie music and art scene,” Cretton continued. “They’re honestly some of the most genuine, childlike, creative people that I’ve ever met.”

Providing that emotional core is Brook, whose sisters and estranged father come from Ohio to spread his mother’s ashes in the ocean. With their arrival we see not only how much he warms up and opens up around his sisters but also how much he hasn’t dealt with their mother’s death and his abrupt departure from their home state.

Bogart, for whom Cretton wrote the role, hits all the right notes — not only because he manages to be a total jerk that is still likeable, but also because as a long-time musical theater actor, he’s a natural at playing a singer and musician. He also brings a small bit of street cred by being a native Ohioan — a detail Cretton occasionally mined for content.

“Destin would just come in and say something and be like, ‘Where are you from again? I forgot,'” Bogart said with a wry grin. “[I’d say], ‘A little town called Houston, there’s nothing going on there really…. There’s a lot of dirt, lot of beans.’ Then that made it in the script and I was like, ‘You son of a bitch!'”

(Full disclosure: This reporter has been into Dominic Bogart for more than a decade, not because she’s cooler than you but because they happened to go to high school together. In Ohio.)

What ties I Am Not a Hipster together, though, is the music. In the narrative of the film, the audience learns that Brook scored an indie-rock hit with his album Canines — a record that was written by composer Joel West and performed by Bogart. (Check it out above.)

“In a way, the Canines album is like a prequel, because it supposedly came out before the time frame of the movie,” West said. “For anybody who does listen to that music or read those lyrics before they go [to see I Am Not a Hipster], they would probably have a more dynamic understanding of what’s going on.”

As for the film’s future, Cretton remains coy. The director, whose short film Short Term 12 won the Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance fest, says he’s gotten some interest from possible distributors, but nothing is final. “I feel pretty confident that people will be able to watch this movie if they want to,” he said.

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